A note to my friends who still back Trump:
I am not here to dunk on you. I am writing because you have a working brain, and this story insults it.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a $14 million paint job. Shortly thereafter the water turned green and the new “American flag blue” coating started peeling off the bottom in sheets. Trump says vandals did it. He claims, without evidence, that someone took a knife and cut a 300-foot slit, a number that grew to 350 feet while he was still talking.
Back on May 4, Trump bragged about that same coating and said, if you had a knife, you could not even cut it, so strong, like powerful rubber. He cannot have it both ways.
And the green water?
A George Mason scientist tested it and found ordinary, non-toxic algae, the kind that blooms in any shallow sunny pool. To fight it, crews dumped hydrogen peroxide into the water.
Hydrogen peroxide is also a paint stripper.
That, not sabotage or vandalism, is the obvious reason the paint came off. They wrecked their own paint job, then blamed phantom vandals for it.
The lone "vandal" they paraded is a 67-year-old Olympian who touched a flap of paint already peeling on its own.
Here is the thing. If they will look you in the eye and lie about something this small, something you can see with your own eyes, ask yourself what else they are lying to you about.
Again, you have a working brain. People like Karoline Leavitt are counting on you to stay loyal instead of exercising independent thought.
Prove them wrong.
So let me get this straight: Pulling a chunk of paint out of the Reflecting Pool gets you arrested for vandalism, but trump’s terrorists who attacked the Capitol, killed cops, broke windows, stole shit, and smeared their feces on the walls get to go free?
If you think California is taking a while to count votes, wait until you hear how long the Trump Administration is taking to release the Epstein files…
Trump’s egregious (repeat) lie about Jan. 6 in the new NBC interview he walked out of: “They had FBI agents ushering them into the building. They had FBI: ‘Go into the building.’”
There’s precisely no evidence this happened. DOJ’s inspector general found that the FBI had zero undercover agents in the Capitol crowd. Kash Patel has himself debunked a Trump-promoted conspiracy theory on this subject, saying FBI agents were merely deployed to do crowd control after the police declared a riot.
And of the dozens of Jan. 6 defendants who tried a “the cops let me in” defense, just one (1) was acquitted. Even in that case, the acquitting judge said that though the defendant reasonably believed he was being allowed in, the officers in question were actually overrun by the crowd and standing back reasonably and responsibly, not explicitly encouraging anyone to enter. (And they weren’t FBI.)
I wonder what would have happened if a lady stormed out of an interview with meet the press all because they couldn’t handle following questions about their little conspiracy theory?
Donald had a temper tantrum on national television and walked out of an interview simply because Kristen Welker presented him with a basic fact.
Note to other journalists: now is the time to pile on. He won't be able to handle it.
Right! And we are all brainwashed to think it’s something to aspire to. I know this is old but the difference between one million and one billion is so vast I think people can’t comprehend it. One million seconds equals is 11.5 days. One billion seconds is 31.7 Years. And Elon is about to be a trillionaire. That would be 31,700 years. Now do the math in dollars. And the fact is that no one in the history of the world has ever attained that wealth by any other means then some form of domination over others. I do not begrudge financial success, but I do have a real problem when the the top 0.1% (130,000 families) hold 6 times the wealth as the bottom 66 million households combined. Put another way 905 individuals in America have twice the wealth of the entire bottom half of the country- 165,000,000 people. And it wasn’t always this way. The top 0.1 percent’s share of the U.S. wealth pie has grown 59.6 percent since just 1989.
An appropriate birthday present on my uncle's birthday today. A federal judge ruled that President Trump and the Kennedy Center Board acted unlawfully in renaming the Kennedy Center. The judge held that only Congress can change the Center's name and blocked the planned two-year closure. I know they'll probably appeal and the story isn't over, but for today let’s celebrate a great birthday gift.
can't stop thinking about people that first ate mushrooms they found and just had to go through trial and error of like, this one tastes like beef, this one killed Brian immediately and this one makes you see God for a week
This day in Vancouver #Canucks history, May 24, 2011:
Kevin Bieksa scores the winner in double overtime of Game 5 against the Sharks and sends the Canucks to the Stanley Cup Final.
@kbieksa3
🎥: NHL
There’s so much going on that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the president is telling so many lies.
Here’s a fact check of 28 different false claims President Donald Trump made from Monday through Friday. https://t.co/K0hfbxA7TS
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.